A Quarter for a Kiss (38 page)

Things began moving quickly.

Merveaux’s boat docked at the Sugar Manse resort. He walked up the dock and into the main building, where he stayed for quite a while. Eventually, he and his bodyguard emerged out of the front side of the building and took a cab straight to the parking lot at Peace Hill. The cab remained with Merveaux seated inside while the bodyguard hiked the uphill trail toward the “Christ.” We all waited breathlessly, and about ten minutes later the bodyguard came backand got in the cab.

“On the move, on the move,” the agent at the monitor said as the cab pulled away. Once it was out of sight, an agent came out of hiding and ran up the hill toward the Christ. Meanwhile, Merveaux’s cab returned to the Sugar Manse.

“What’s he doing back at the hotel?” an agent’s voice said.

Everyone was silent, so I ventured a guess.

“He needs to make the next transfer,” I said. “He wants a secure place to do some banking.”

They agreed, talking about moving in for an arrest at that point, but they were determined to hold out as long as possible.

“Any sign of what the bodyguard found at the Christ?” Holt asked into his microphone.

“There’s something here,” the agent replied. “Inside an old windmill. I don’t know what it means, exactly.”

“What is it?” the commander asked.

“It’s just a bunch of numbers scraped into the wall. But I can tell it was freshly done.”

Tom stepped forward. “Numbers,” he whispered. “It’s encrypted.”

I looked at him and then back at Agent Holt.

“What are the numbers?” he asked. “Can you read them off to us?”

“Uh, let’s see.”

Tom grabbed a pen and paper and wrote them down as the man read: 32 29 24 33 12 11 41 31 14 13 34 22 26 21 20 14 34 42.

“Thanks,” Tom said.

He carried the paper across the room and sat at a table, going to work.

“Maybe we should call cryptography in Maryland,” the agent working the equipment said to Holt. “See what they can do with it.”

“Are you kidding me?” Holt replied, lowering his voice. “We’ve got the king of cryptography in the room with us here. That’s Tom Bennett.”

The guy looked at Tom and then back at his boss, his eyes widening.

“
The
Tom Bennett? What’s he doing here?”

The man shrugged.

“I don’t know. Guess we got lucky.”

Guess we got lucky indeed
, I thought.

“We have movement on the East End,” a woman’s voice said over the wire. “A truck is just pulling out of Streep’s driveway.”

“What kind of truck?”

“A small cargo truck. All white with a few dings in the bumper. Can’t read the plate. They turned west on East End Road.”

Nerves were taut. There was so much at stake here—but the FBI walked a fine line between keeping tabs and showing their hand.

“Hold back,” Holt advised. “This is a small island without a lot of roads. We won’t lose them.”

And they didn’t. The truck passed various surveillance points along the way, eventually ending up at the
Enigma’s
boat slip.

Holt leaned forward, speaking into the microphone.

“All right, who’s got a visual on the boat?”

“I do, sir,” one voice said. “This is Craig. I’m about eight slips down the way. Looks like they’re taking stuff out of the truck and loading it onto the boat. I got two men, the same two who were with her on the beach. I don’t see the woman.”

“This is Reese, sir,” another voice said. “I’m almost there, walking from the other direction.”

“Good. Craig, Reese, listen up. I need to know what they’re bringing aboard.”

“So far, it’s mostly clothes, some boxes. A computer.”

Holt seemed ready to snap. It was like fishing—he didn’t want to set the hook until it was fully in the creature’s mouth.

Craig continued to give us an oral report of the items that were being loaded onto the boat until the technical guy with us finally got the monitor up and running. Suddenly, the black-and-white screen flashed to life, showing the scene from the hidden camera mounted on his boat. We all watched the unloading of the truck, an endless series of trips back and forth between the boat and the vehicle. After a moment, a second monitor popped on, revealing a landscape so odd, it looked like the moon. I stared at the screen for a while and then figured it must be Drake’s Pond, the second drop site. There was a body of water there, but it was ringed in some odd foamy-looking substance.

“What’s wrong with that water?” I asked.

“It’s a salt pond,” Holt replied. “Sea water gets trapped there, and the sun burns off the water, leaving the salt.

“Sir, we’ve got movement at the Sugar Manse,” an agent said suddenly. “Merveaux and his guy are back in the cab. They have turned east on Northshore Road.”

“They’re going to the second drop location,” Holt said. “Are we in place?”

Two voices answered in the affirmative.

“I’ve got visual and audio,” the technician said.

I took a deep breath, feeling as though I might explode. This was too tense for me. I paced the room, pausing occasionally to peek over Tom’s shoulder at the paper he was working on. It was covered with notations, letters, numbers, and scribbles. I realized that if Tom could decrypt the location where Dianne had hidden the artifacts, then the FBI would get the biggest, best bust of all because they could arrive at the place ahead of Merveaux and arrest him the moment he seized the stolen property.

In the midst of all of the confusion, my cell phone rang. I stepped outside and answered, expecting to hear Jodi. Instead, a voice as special and familiar as any I’d ever heard raced across the miles to me, in a sound so sweet my eyes instantly filled with tears.

“Snap out of it?” the voice on the phone said. “Did you really tell me to ‘snap out of it’?”

It was Eli! He was awake!

Forty-One

I called him back on a landline from a small office elsewhere in the building. Sitting at someone’s desk in a stiff vinyl office chair, I closed my eyes and let tears flow down my cheeks.
Thank You, Jesus
.

We talked at first about him, about how he had slowly started to regain consciousness last night. By morning, he said, he was talking some, but Stella made him wait to call me until she felt he was completely coherent.

“Eli, you scared me to death,” I cried. “Do you understand that you may never, ever die?”

“I’ll try to live forever, sugar,” he said, “but I can’t make any promises.”

“At least not this time. Not now.”

“No, not now,” he agreed. “My heart’s pumping strong—I know that because there’s this little blonde nurse who gives me my sponge bath, and—ow!”

I could hear Stella in the background.

“A joke,” Eli said. “It was a joke. I only have eyes for you, Stel.”

Over the line, I thought I could detect the sound of a kiss.

“Sorry to break up the love fest,” I said, “but you got us in quite a mess down here. I’ve got some big questions for you.”

“Yeah, I want to know what’s going on. Is Nadine safe? Is she okay?”

“That’s the first thing you want to know?” I asked. “You get shot by a sniper, make it out of a coma, and the first thing you want to know is how Nadine is doing?”

“Callie, tell me she’s still alive.”

“She’s still alive,” I said. “But she doesn’t need protecting from anybody, Eli. She’s a criminal. She’s about to go to jail.”

“All right,” he replied. “Just make sure they understand she can’t go in under Nadine Peters. She probably can’t go in under Dianne Streep, either. It’s time to change her identity again.”

“Eli, who is she hiding from?”

He coughed a bit and then sipped some water before speaking again, his voice a little less vibrant than before.

“A man named Victor Rushkin,” he rasped. “He was her supervisor at the NSA—and the mastermind behind a vast network of Russian spies. He recruited her directly, and when they were caught, she turned state’s evidence. Her testimony incriminated people at all levels.
All
levels. She got protected—he got forty years at Leavenworth. Now she’s certain there’s a new contract on her head straight from him.”

“But why are you sympathetic to her?” I asked. “Eli, she betrayed you. She betrayed our country. You
shot
her, for goodness’ sake.”

“Callie,” he said, his voice sounding weaker. “Don’t you understand? A couple months ago, when I took photos of her on that ferry and then later brought them in to the NSA, I opened a great big can of worms. Only a handful of people knew she was alive. I started asking questions and somehow those photos made it to the wrong person. This may have happened decades ago, but these people she turned on have not forgotten, nor forgiven. Nadine told me that ever since I started snooping around and she realized she had been made, her death warrant was as good as signed. She said every time she starts her car, she braces herself for an explosion. Every time she walks through a crowd, she expects to be stabbed or shot.”

“When did she tell you that? When did she talk to you?”

“The day I was shot she came here, to Cocoa Beach. I was down at the beach. You know that park where they have the wooden walkways and the little covered picnic tables? That’s where I always rest after my walk. I was sitting there, catching my breath, when a woman came walking up. It was Nadine.”

He went on to describe their meeting there. She had come, she said, because she wanted him to stop what he was doing—stop investigating her, stop asking questions about her. Yes, she was alive, but now she would have to disappear again, this time for good, thanks to him.

“If she dies, it’s my fault. If Rushkin kills her, then I might as well have been the one to pull the trigger. By trying to get some simple information for myself, I may have signed her death warrant.”

I shook my head.

“It’s not your fault, Eli,” I said. “You couldn’t have known. We reap what we sow. She’s an art thief now, you know. I just saw her make a three-million-dollar sale of stolen artifacts.”

That seemed to quiet him for a moment.

“She’s a legitimate art dealer,” he said defensively.

“She’s also an illegitimate one,” I replied.

He sat with that, the silence crackling between us.

“I don’t know why I should be surprised,” he said finally. “She never did like following the rules.”

Eli gave the phone to Stella and we talked a few minutes more. She was elated at his recovery, confused by the things he had told her, and probably even a bit concerned about the state of their marriage. Eli had kept Nadine a secret from all of us—including Stella. I urged her to forgive him but also to insist on complete honesty from now on. He may have had the right to keep the story of his first love to himself, but as a married man, he hadn’t had the right to conduct the investigation he had conducted without keeping his wife informed.

“Thank you, Callie,” Stella said. “I was kind of feeling that way, but then I thought maybe I was just being hard on him.”

“Can I be hard on you?” I asked.

“Uh, of course.”

“Your life is too full, Stella,” I said. “I know you enjoy being active, but your husband should be your first priority, not your tenth or eleventh or twentieth. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes, I do,” she said, bursting into tears. “And I already realized that on my own, the day he got shot.”

I soothed her a bit and then asked to speak to him one more time.

“Eli, I know you’re tired,” I said, “but you’ve got to answer one more question for me.”

“Okay, sweetheart. I’ll try.”

“Who shot you?”

“I don’t know, Callie,” he replied. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

Forty-Two

When I went back to the control room, the place was in a frenzy. Tom had found the key to the code! Everyone stood waiting breathlessly as he went down the line of numbers, working the final mathematical steps and then converting the numbers to letters, unlocking the secret. I stepped closer to him to see the answer: S T T S E C U R E S T O R A G E 4 2.

A cheer went up from the agents, and even the restrained Agent Holt had a big grin on his face.